On Saturday 10th January 2015, WebLearn was moved to brand new hardware which is distributed over two physical locations. This was a major undertaking and is the culmination of a number of months of work by both the WebLearn and Infrastructure and Hosting teams within IT Services.
WebLearn is now located in both Banbury Road and the University Shared Data Centre and will ultimately have duplicated database and search servers plus four worker nodes each running two virtual machines. The worker nodes are located behind a Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controller which ensures an even distribution of load across all workers – there are actually two of these machines in case the primary machine fails.
The WebLearn file store is also duplicated over two sites.
This new infrastructure will be more resilient than the previous set up due to the hardware duplication, co-location and move to a higher number of (virtual) workers each supporting a smaller number of users.
